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Jeopardy

Last month, IBM's Watson supercomputer beat trivia champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on "Jeopardy." At the core of Watson's success was something called Semantic Analysis Technology, and if you want to make your own "Jeopardy" bet, put some money on the companies that supply it.

If nobody's perfect, same goes for computers. Big Blue's digital dynamo Watson may have handily defeated its human rivals this week on the Jeopardy! challenge, but it made some major errors along the way. IBM's engineers have been posting post-mortems about that on the Internet.

IBM's supercomputer Watson racked up $5,000 in winnings on day one of the three-day Jeopardy! challenge Monday, but so did one of its human competitors. The human champs, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, face long odds -- at least according those betting their own money on the action.

Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter know how tough IBM's Watson supercomputer will be to defeat. But with the honor of the human race at stake next week, they both have strategies that they're counting on to outwit the ultra-brainy black box. Here's a look at how they're preparing for the ultimate challenge.

Brandishing hardware and software optimized for understanding the nuances of natural language questions, Big Blue's supercomputer is preparing to face two flesh-and-blood champions of the TV game show. It'll also showcase IBM's growing abilities in analytics software that could appeal to a lot of businesses.

Meet Watson, aspiring Jeopardy champ. He%u2019s a black rectangle with a globe avatar, and he absorbed 200 million pages of text to prepare for the game show.
Watson is the IBM (IBM) supercomputer sent to do battle with human contestants on Jeopardy. He analyzes the vast amounts of information in his databases to come up with contextual clues that let him understand human language, spotting subtleties like the difference between a dog%u2019s bark and a tree%u2019s bark, CNN reported.

Jeopardy will have an unusual contestant next year - an IBM (IBM) computing system named "Watson."
Watson will take on the show%u2019s two most successful contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in February, according to the show%u2019s website.

Along with hitting the lottery and scoring the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, winning big money on a game show ranks up there on the list of American dreams. Here are some stories of game show heroes and heroines, and what they did after the check arrived and the bright lights faded.

There's a massive doctor shortage coming. One solution: develop artificial intelligence that is as good or better at diagnosis than a real physician. But will patients be willing to trust robot doctors with their health?